Hacker News Reader

Comment by typis7 | Hacker News Reader

I blocked the domain. If the site presents me with a re-captcha, I don't even have to think whether to use that site.

That's a pretty dismissive attitude. We recently added reCAPTCHA to our sign up flow at Codecademy and it helped combat spam a lot. The site was harder to manage and moderate before we took that little step.

Assuming all websites using reCAPTCHA are not worth using seems ridiculous to me.

Captchas are dismissive towards users.

You throw humans and robots in the same basket and tell all of them to solve a puzzle or you won't talk to them.

I understand your point, but do you have a better suggestion to solve the spam problem? It's a really hard problem, and CAPTCHAs do a reasonable job of solving it at low cost to the end user.

This is like the places that make me store my backpack behind the counter while I'm shopping. Yes, I totally get that it's one way to combat theft, but it's also treating me like I might steal something. From a UX perspective, it's hostile. I'm having to do work to solve a problem that I've never been the cause of. So if I have a choice, I don't visit those establishments a second time. They have chosen to put those extra roadblocks in place, and I've chosen to go somewhere where I don't feel like I'm getting punished for someone else's crime. Seems like a win/win to me.

To suggest it's a "dismissive attitude" to not want to be hassled due to some other bad actor implies looking at it from the business perspective, and not necessarily from the perspective of the effect it has on users.

I guess that can be healthy since that plug-in is undoubtedly used for Google's own profiling to somehow sell more ads, heh.

Don't worry, there are additional blocked domains just for that. :-)

post a copy of your hosts.conf?

Pretty much this: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Note that certain adware/spyware domains, like google-analytics( look at the tags <maybe-spy> and <maybe-ads> ), are commented out, so edit the file as per your needs.

Google's re-capthas are coming from google.com, to block them add:

127.0.0.1 google.com

127.0.0.1 www.google.com

This may be a tough choice to make, depending on how integrated has Google become with your life ( note how I phrased this relationship ).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com